East Yorkshire artist Mandy Barker has found a way to make us look again at pollution – cataloguing fibres from fast fashion in the style of a Victorian book about British algae
When Mandy Barker stumbled upon a fragment of colour in a rock pool while walking near Spurn Point, East Yorkshire, in 2012, she was bewitched. “I thought it was a piece of seaweed with lovely colours on it – greeny-browny – but when I went to pick it out, I saw that it was actually a strip of clothing material,” she says.
Growing up on the Yorkshire coast, Barker had become used to the coastline she once walked to collect driftwood shells changing around her. “Over the years I saw TVs, fridge freezers and computers washing up on the beach,” she said. “Fishers there told me they could see trawlers out at sea visibly dumping waste into the ocean. People would pay these trawlermen to take their rubbish out and dump it. And the fish were getting tangled up in it.”
